Small Account Challenge Day 15: -$70 In A Rough Learning Tuesday

I had a crappy day. I mean, let’s call it what it is. I made two really stupid mistakes, one totally avoidable and the other taught me a lot about pinch plays. So I’m down 6% today because of it.

I’m down $141.62 in the last week. You see why I’m trying new strategies!?

Here’s what happened. I played a few stocks testing some new patterns but most of my losses were in $SAEX. This was a pinch play, which I’m learning about is a very reliable MACD pattern whereby the MACD line starts to cross and run together with the 9EMA line above it. Once it goes over and separates from the EMA, boom a powerful bump in price happens on the stock. As I’ve learned today that thrust can be very short lived so if you miss it, you can be in big trouble. I was. I lost 7% on my trade holding too long thinking the pop was about to happen, when in fact I was on the other side of it. I see that now. After losing $67 I can see where the pop starts and ends. It was actually up nearly 17% on the pinch.

So my next play was $ESV which was also a pinch play, and I actually caught it fairly accurately. I only bought 5 shares so with trade fees I wasn’t going to see any gains, but I wanted to make sure I made an honest play at the stock to get a feel for it. This one I actually played right.

The last one is another strategy I’m trying which is actually proving extremely reliable as I’ve been watching it over the past week (but have been too scared of the strategy to use any actual money until today). It’s a bottom bounce play, whereby a stock makes a huge dip in one day, usually after hours because of some news, and you want to pick up the gains from the bounce. So naturally, I was a little scared of putting money in a stock with all the indicators pointing DOWN. $DERM actually ended up being a good play, however, my only mistake was not being able to watch the market and putting in a sell strategy order on Ustocktrade that I meant to delete but did not. I got a nice notification saying my sell order had been executed, for a gain of four cents, but I missed the rest of the 10.5% gain the stock made while I was working! What an idiot.

I completely believe it proves the idea true, that when you are down you make mistakes; and when you are up, you play your best. This past week exemplifies that.

To counteract, I have found the bottom bounce play reliable enough over the last week and from other back-tests that I will play that strategy moving forward.

I’m still up overall in my small account, the current balance is $1,083.07. I am totally confident I will make back my errors!